Guide to Grammar and Style — H

There's nothing
wrong with the word, but I find it overused as an intensifier. If
you're constructing a metaphor in
which weight is appropriate — heavily overloaded, for
instance — it's a fine word. If not, try to find a more
appropriate adverb, and your sentence will probably be more vivid
as a result. [Entry added 24 April 2006.]

Greek:
hoi, nominative masculine plural of the article
ho, “the”; polloi, nominative masculine plural
of polus, “many.” The phrase means “the common people,
the masses.” Don't confuse it with the upper classes — it
has nothing to do with “high” or “hoity-toity.”

The big controversy about hoi polloi in English
— the sort of thing that raises blood pressures to
dangerous levels — is whether you should say “the
hoi polloi”: hoi already means the, so “the hoi
polloi” means “the the many.” Then again, people have been saying
“the hoi polloi” for as long as they've been using the expression
in English (since 1668, says the OED). Besides, we
say “the La Brea Tar Pits,” even though that means “the the tar
tar pits.” And the al at the beginning of many English
words derived from Arabic — alcohol,
alchemy, algebra — originally meant
the, but no one finds “the alcohol” redundant.

I don't have good advice on this one. Dropping the
the runs the risk of sounding pedantic; leaving it in
runs the risk of sounding illiterate. Another skunked word, I'm afraid. [Entry
added 20 Jan. 2005.]

According to
traditionalists, hopefully means in a hopeful
way, not I hope. You'll keep them (and me) happy by
avoiding hopefully in formal
writing; use I hope, we hope, I would
like, or, what's often best of all, leave it out altogether.
It's the paradigmatic example of a skunked term. [Revised 12 Jan.
2005.]

Some questions
have no “true” answers, only competing standards used in
different places. There are of course differences in spelling and punctuation in various countries,
but “house style” refers to the choices about (mostly minor)
matters that each publishing house sets on its own. Newspaper
publishers, for instance, often use different rules than book publishers do. It's not a
question of which is “right” or “wrong”; learn to suit your mechanics to the forum for which
you're writing. See Apostrophe,
Capitalization, Citation, Commas, Dash,
Ellipses, Italics, Numbers, and Punctuation and Spaces.

A tip to make your
writing livelier: avoid starting your sentences with
however. This isn't a rule, just a way to make for
better emphasis.

What can you do instead? Starting a sentence with but is a little informal, but usually more forceful than
starting with however. On the other hand, you can tuck
the however inside the sentence: “She did,
however, finish the book.”

By the way, this refers only to the conjunctionhowever, not
the adverbhowever.
“However much he tried, he could never lift it”; “However you did
it, it seems to be working again” — they're copacetic.
[Entry added 20 Jan. 2005.]

Hypercorrection means being so concerned with getting
the grammar right that you get it wrong. For instance, we have it
drilled into our heads that “Me and him went to the game” is
wrong; it should be “He and I went to the game.” Too
many people end up thinking “He and I” is therefore more proper,
and use it in inappropriate places, like “A message came for he
and I” — it should be “A message came for him and
me.” Whom is another
frequent problem for hypercorrectors; they have the sense that
whom is more correct than who, and use it
improperly. See also Agreement.

A hyphen joins the
two parts of a compound word or the two elements of a range:
self-conscious; pp. 95-97. (Hard-core typography nerds
will point out that ranges of numbers are marked with an
en-dash — pp. 95–97 — but you needn't
worry about it: type a hyphen.) A compound noun used as an adjective is often hyphenated: a
present-tense verb. (For more details, see Predicate.) An exhaustive (not to say
exhausting) list of rules and examples appears in The Chicago
Manual of Style. Don't confuse a hyphen with a Dash, although you can type a dash as two
hyphens.